Goodbye
by E.P.O
Summary: Short one-shot. Walter's last thoughts and recollections before the Holy Assumption began.


Goodbye

Walter Sullivan glared at the bowl of soup with a complete lack of appetite. He took the spoon and stirred the yellow surface. A few lumps of cauliflower floated up.

"_Yuck_," the kid said from his spot on the corner of the cell, opposite the uncomfortable bed where Walter sat. "_I'm not gonna eat that_."

Walter listened to the footsteps of the guard who had just brought him this disgusting excuse for a last meal. The guard was walking down the corridor again, back to his office - retreating from the depressing cacophony uttered by all the inmates of Toluca Prison. Cries and moans of despair, furious shouts and screams, pathetic sobbing, nervous footsteps …

But Walter Sullivan remained silent.

"_What is this place?_" the kid wanted to know. He rose from the floor and brushed some dirt off his trousers and the back of his striped jersey. "_It's like the Tower … but no one's watching me here._"

Walter nodded. His cell was located in the middle of the corridor on the first floor. He could hear a rasping snore from the cell behind him, a crying woman from the cell ahead, and someone chuckling in the cell above. But he could not see any of his neighbours, and they could not see him.

"_What are you doing here?_" the kid asked Walter.

"I'm waiting for my execution," the man said. His voice sounded remarkably calm.

The kid frowned. "_What's an execution?_"

"That's when you kill someone because they've done something bad."

"_But_ …" The kid walked across the cell and stared out, innocent blue eyes peering through the filthy bars. "_You haven't done anything_ bad, _have you?_"

_Billy and Miriam Locane were sitting on the middle of the desolate forest road when the stranger came. A man's shadow fell over the little plastic cars and miniature horses. The children looked up from their toys, looked up from their last moments of a joyful childhood, and saw death. _

"Yes," Walter told the kid. He stirred the cauliflower about again with no intentions of actually eating it, despite his growing hunger. "Yes, I have done something."

_Miriam let out a high-pitched shriek as she saw her brother fall to the ground, as a pool of crimson spread over the dusty road, as the man in the coat raised his axe again with one quick, purposeful movement. The girl saw her brother's blood and shreds of intestines still clinging to the blade._

_The man in the coat gave a slight smile._

_As if this smile was the starting signal for a race, Miriam spun around and ran. She screamed again, screamed and ran, hoping to make her way back to the Locane family's house on Levin Street. If only she could get back and tell her parents about the scary man, they would go and put him in jail, and they'd get Billy to a hospital and he would be alright, and the grown-ups would fix everything and –_

_All of Miriam's hopes were snuffed out in a splitsecond. Walter flung the axe after her, and the blade easily pierced her skull. She saw blood spraying before her wide, tearful eyes – could not believe that all this blood had come from her own head – then Miriam Locane stopped screaming, and she saw nothing at all._

"_Why did you do it?_" the kid asked. He now stood leaned against the bars, watching Walter reproachfully.

"I did it for mommy." A loving tone suddenly entered Walter's voice. He smiled and raised the spoon out of the cauliflower soup, gently pressing the metal edge against his Adam's apple. A few drops of the hot, yellow liquid trickled down his neck and stained his coat. "Just like the other eight Sacraments, I did it for mommy." He found the jugular vein and pressed the spoon a little harder against his throat. "Don't you wanna go back to mommy, Walter?"

The kid slowly nodded, then turned around to face the corner of the cell. Grown-up Walter was doing something _bad_ again. The kid never wanted to look when Walter did something _bad_.

Instead, he looked at the few good things he could still remember.

_He was back in the peaceful little playground in front of Wish House again. Bob was there, too. Twilight had just pushed the sun down under the horizon, and all the children would soon have to go inside for their evening prayer. The two boys sat playing with plastic cars – the same kind that Billy and Miriam would be playing with when the bad Walter came and raised his axe –_

"No! I don't want to see that again!" the kid yelled.

Walter dug the spoon into the stubble-covered skin, into the pulse that lay underneath it. He clenched his eyes shut as that pulse was interrupted for a moment. But interrupting it wouldn't be enough. He had to sever it completely.

He pressed the spoon in harder.

_Bob looked up from the miniature cars. _"_Walter?_"

"_Yeah?_"

"_Have you ever thought about going outside the walls?"_

"_But … then the Master will get mad, and Andrew …"_

_Silence reigned for a few seconds. All the orphans at Wish House feared Andrew like the Devil himself. When someone tried to sneak out in the forest, Andrew would always catch them. And he'd beat them up in front of all the other children, just to frighten them out of trying their own escape routes. And sometimes, he'd do something _worse. _Something so _bad _that he didn't want to let the other children see it …_

"_We'll wait," Bob said and started pushing one of the little trucks around aimlessly. He gave Walter a reassuring grin. "We'll wait till a day when it's real foggy, and then we'll sneak out through the forest. I don't think anyone's gonna stop us if we keep walking in the fog."_

"_Not even Andrew?"_

"_Nope."_

Walter's fingers turned white as he clutched the spoon and forced it into his throat. His eyes were now wide open, and pitchblack shapes danced across his vision like a Rorshach test that had jumped off the paper. A trickle of urine soaked his brown trousers. The spoon's edge had finally pierced the skin and entered his windpipe.

_The fog was not thick enough yet. They should have waited longer. But now, Andrew had caught them. He reared back his fist and smashed it into Bob's face, while Walter scrambled back and tried to hide in the bushes. The kid pressed his hands tightly against his ears, but Bob's piercing screams still seeped through. Walter felt tears welling up behind his eyelids …_

_**stupid little crybaby**_

… _and suddenly, the kid realized that, although he did despise Andrew DeSalvo, he didn't want to be with Bob either. Neither friends nor enemies could really mean anything to him. He only loved one person in this world, and that was his -_

"Mommy!_" _Walter tried to yell, but his voice had already been destroyed under the pressure of the spoon. He only managed to produce a garbled, hissing sound: "_Ooohm-yyrrrh!_"

Saliva flowed from Walter's mouth and blood from his nostrils. His left arm twitched and flailed, knocking the bowl off the cell's narrow table. Cauliflower soup and blood mixed in a growing pool on the floor. His right hand ripped the spoon out of his throat and flung it across the room. The crimson jet instantly grew larger and faster. Blood sprayed across the entire floor of the cell and out through the bars, down the corridor in small red rivers.

Walter fell to the floor, landing on his left side. From this position, he could see the kid in the corner of the cell. The boy rose to his full height, towering above Walter, and walked up to the dying man with a look of pity on his face.

"_You've done something bad again, haven't you?"_

"_It doesn't matter,_" Walter thought. He would become the Conjurer now. After the 11th Sacrament, he could go outside the walls and walk in the fog again. And this time, no one would stop him on his way to Room 302.

No one.

The kid produced a small shape from his pocket and placed it on Walter's limp palm. Walter looked down at the object. He instantly recognized it as the doll that had been given to him by that girl, the 20th Sacrament. Its milky-white face was now smeared in blood.

Eyes glassy, Walter looked back up at the kid. His fingers tightened around the doll.

"_Thanks_."

The last thing Walter sensed before he lost all consciousness was the sound of footsteps running down the corridor. The footsteps of a guard who had come far too late.

"_Goodbye …_"

* * *

A/N: I figured it was about time someone wrote about Walter's suicide, so here's my version. Sorry if it reads a bit disjointed. I got all the basic ideas for Walter's last thoughts while staring at the ceiling as I tried to fall asleep at about 1 AM … actually, I tend to get a lot of fic ideas when I'm still awake at 1 AM. Tis weird.

Err … just leave a review, thanks.


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